Highways of Freedom
The Reith Lectures
BBC
4.2 • 770 Ratings
🗓️ 6 December 1989
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
French poet Jacques Darras delivers the third of his Reith Lectures entitled 'Beyond the Tunnel of History'. He argues that with the opening of the Channel tunnel a new age of mobility is within everyone's grasp. Many can now follow in the footsteps of the wealthy and literary by going on their very own 'Grand Tour' of Europe. This freedom, Darras argues, will bring cultures closer together and unify Europe.
In his third lecture entitled 'Highways of Freedom', Jacques Darras explores the new European nationality. He evaluates how Western and Eastern Europe alike are throwing into the melting-pot the old national territorialities of earlier history. He explains how this is creating a new mobility - and thus new freedoms - for all Europeans.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reith Lectures. |
| 0:04.3 | This lecture in the series Beyond the Tunnel of History, given by Jacques Daris, was originally broadcast in 1989. |
| 0:13.1 | I was born in December 1939, into a winter of discontent and cold. |
| 0:19.0 | One of the coldest for many years, I was told, by the edge of |
| 0:23.1 | the forest of Cressee. That saw in 1346 the armies mustered and mastered by the Black |
| 0:31.4 | Prince and his father, King Edward III, defeating the pride and arrogance of the French cavalry, |
| 0:39.2 | which was the opening, actually, of what I'd rather call the 600-year's war |
| 0:44.7 | instead of a 100-year-s war, because, in my opinion, that 600-year-s war |
| 0:50.7 | only came to an end with the defeat of Hitlerism in 1945. |
| 0:56.5 | My father was made a prisoner by the Germans in early spring 1940, and he was sent to work |
| 1:03.7 | on the labour camp down in Silesia, which happened to be in East Germany these days. |
| 1:09.3 | When he came back, a rather embittered man and frustrated for having |
| 1:15.3 | had a sense of wasting his life and more than all his youth, he and my mother, who happened to be |
| 1:23.0 | school teachers, decided to start a new life, to start from scratch. So they moved farther inland. |
| 1:30.4 | They were not allowed to go too far away, actually, because as school teachers, they had to stay |
| 1:35.1 | within the confines of the department. |
| 1:37.0 | So this decided to move farther inland closer to the main cities, Amiens and Abbeville, along the same highway running from Cali to Paris. |
| 1:49.4 | I was a child of six by the time, and I felt very sorry to have to leave the forest where I used to take walks with my mother, |
| 1:58.3 | as well as the sea whose presence, whose softening presence was felt in the place |
| 2:04.3 | I lived in. But I had to adjust my emotions, to cut them down to size, as it were, to the new place |
| 2:12.8 | of plateaus and flatlands and open fields I was to inhabit, running to infinity, under sky of clouds |
| 2:21.2 | chased by the wind, as in some painting by Ruizdiel, or that painter that I'm very fond of, |
... |
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